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The operating phases of an eVTOL need varying amounts of power; some require the battery to discharge high amounts of current rapidly, reducing the distance the vehicle can travel before its battery must be recharged. Credit: Andy Sproles/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Researchers at ORNL are taking cleaner transportation to the skies by creating and evaluating new batteries for airborne electric vehicles that take off and land vertically. 

ORNL researchers achieved the highest wireless power transfer level for a light-duty passenger vehicle when the team demonstrated a 100-kW wireless power transfer to an EV using ORNL’s patented polyphase electromagnetic coupling coil. Credit: Genevieve Martin/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

A team of researchers at ORNL demonstrated that a light-duty passenger electric vehicle can be wirelessly charged at 100-kW with 96% efficiency using polyphase electromagnetic coupling coils with rotating magnetic fields.

Instantaneous solution quantities shown for a static Mach 1.4 solution on a mesh consisting of 33 billion elements using 33,880 GPUs, or 90% of Frontier.  From left to right, contours show the mass fractions of the hydroxyl radical and H2O, the temperature in Kelvin, and the local Mach number. Credit: Gabriel Nastac/NASA

Since 2019, a team of NASA scientists and their partners have been using NASA’s FUN3D software on supercomputers located at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility to conduct computational fluid dynamics simulations of a human-scale Mars lander. The team’s ongoing research project is a first step in determining how to safely land a vehicle with humans onboard onto the surface of Mars.

Caption: Jaswinder Sharma makes battery coin cells with a lightweight current collector made of thin layers of aligned carbon fibers in a polymer with carbon nanotubes. Credit: Genevieve Martin/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Electric vehicles can drive longer distances if their lithium-ion batteries deliver more energy in a lighter package. A prime weight-loss candidate is the current collector, a component that often adds 10% to the weight of a battery cell without contributing energy.